


In Our Bedroom After The War

by test_kard_girl



Category: X-Men (Movies), X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: M/M, chronology what chronology, far less kissing than there should be, ridic boys, xavier's school for kids with no social skills
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-18
Updated: 2015-04-18
Packaged: 2018-03-23 15:12:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3772957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/test_kard_girl/pseuds/test_kard_girl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alex is AWOL; Hank found it alot easier to deal with when he was just plain *dead*.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Our Bedroom After The War

**Author's Note:**

> Written in part for the [Let's Make Out III](http://ivoryandgold.livejournal.com/54413.html) comment ficathon, then my brain got carried away.  
> Actually set post- _Days Of Future Past_ , but I've shamelessly messed around with X-Men movie/comics chronology to suit my own needs.
> 
>  
> 
> Enjoy!

_It's too early for this_ , is Hank's first response as he yawns at the melting, mangled security keypad in front of him. Although by this point, he's kind of given up hoping that vigilante hate mobs/SHIELD/Erik Lehnsherr's Brotherhood Of Violent Personality Disorders could at least wait for him to finish his morning coffee before they start fire-bombing the handily well-buried research lab he calls home.

He gulps another mouthful of well-sugared caffeine before setting his mug down and pushing his shoulder against the door.

The lab is in darkness, but Hank's not-quite-human eyes adjust more quickly than they used to, and he can see that the place seems almost suspiciously untouched. His fingers flex, pausing over the light switch.

"Hello?"

No reply. But he's sure there's a shuffling. Just, a tiny movement. A breath.

_Oh fuck._

Hank squeezes his eyes shut. Squeezes them as tight as he can. His fingers slip on the lights.

"Hello?" And it's too loud, a growl, more anger torn up and crammed into two syllables than he wants to have and he knows that when he looks again--

"--You wanna stop shouting?"

Alex rubs the heel of his hand into his eye, scowling sleepily with the other. He's clinging to the corner of Hank's examination table, wrapped up in denim and leather and far too many layers for inside underground in August and his hair is so much shorter and Hank didn't know someone could look sheet-pale and weather-beaten at the same time and even from six feet away the curve of his bottom lip is achingly familiar and Hank stares and stares and stares and turns and walks out.

 

\--

 

"I didn't want to wake you." Charles explains on a sigh. He nudges an apologetic tumbler of scotch across his desk and Hank's hand clenches tight around the glass-- mainly to prevent him doing the same to his friend's neck.

"...Right."

"He arrived very early this morning. Of course I wasn't going to turn him away."

"Of course not." Hank echoes, words leaden with sarcasm and ten years of KEEP OUT and ivy cracking the windowpanes and a game of chess forever arrested and caked in dust.

The other students are starting to wake. Hank listens to the creak of oak floorboards above his head; the rattling of plumbing that desperately needs an overhaul but hell, they're probably gonna plough more of Charles' inheritance into the Cerebro rebuild anyway.

"I don't--" He starts again eventually, rubbing a hand across his face. He could go back to sleep now. Really, that would be great. "Of course he can stay. I just..."

Charles' mouth is pressed to the lip of his own tumbler, although he isn't drinking either; just watching Hank's stuttering with eyes that are always too bright and too dark and give away the fact he can see right through pretty much everything he looks at.

Hanks looks back down at the desk; at the dents and scratches where most of the rest of the furniture got chucked against it at one point or another.

"He was sleeping on my floor." He exhales miserably.

 

\--

 

The way Alex explains it, he's AWOL; sprung from his unit in Vietnam by Raven and dumped back in the US to keep running under his own steam. Hank hears the cut-down version of his story via Charles, wrapping his arms around himself as he listens to the too-familiar tale of the mutant recruits rounded up by their 'superiors' and experimented on. ( _Rounded up and experimented on. Rounded up and experimented on--_ it seems to be all mutants are good for, Hank thinks, stomach knotting dully everytime he sets the needle of a syringe against the vein in his elbow and pushes, watching the blue tinge to his skin melt away.)

Xavier's school is his last resort-- maybe his only resort, with a handy secret underground training facility and a deflective attitude towards strangers and a definite, definite distrust of the US Army. 

It isn't the story Hank expected. But it's better than the alternative and anyway; the truth seems way more flexible nowadays than it once did. 

Charles tells Hank less than he used to-- but perhaps only because they've spent the last decade staining the threadbare carpet with their secrets and there's nothing left now but to move forward. All he does say, however, is that Alex can stay as long as he needs to, and that he'll need at least a preliminary medical to be sure the military haven't pumped him full of anything, y'know, _sentient,_ and Charles could do it and but it'd be easier for Hank.

Hank thinks _that's all relative_ ; but he just tries to quirk his mouth into something a little bit less than a grimace and says _fine._

 

\--

 

"So. You're not blue."

"Still observant." Hank replies dryly, setting out a handful of vials and a nice clean sheet of sticky labels.

Alex just stares at him, eyes that were never hugely fond of bullshit.

"What happened? You find a cure or something?"

"There isn't a cure." Hank measures each word before he pushes it carefully between his lips. His hands are trembling and it's faintly embarrassing, but Alex always did make him feel like a _bozo._ "It just. I created a serum, it dampens the mutation. Temporarily. Sometimes it makes things easier."

He reaches over; adjusts the dial on the scales:

"Up there for a moment please."

He notes down Alex's height and weight (Still short, still solid muscle); takes his blood pressure, writes down in careful doctor's capital letters the location of all his new scars and listens to his chest and bites down on his own lip to keep from screaming or crying or smashing his sample dishes against the walls.

"...You broke into my lab." He murmurs at last, and it is nowhere near anything that he actually wanted to say.

Alex hesitates for just a second; drags his t-shirt back on over his head:

"Xavier gave away my bedroom."

"Yeah. We were pretty sure you weren't coming back."

Hank doesn't really hear it until the words slip off his tongue; until Alex is staring at him with something shattering across his face.

"Alex, no I-I-I didn't mean, come on--"

But Alex is pushing himself off the examination table, elbowing Hank out of the way:

"Y'know what, Hank? Fuck off."

"Alex--"

"Fuck. Off." Alex spits, half an inch from Hank's face. And Hank might have at least three inches and mutated genetics on his side, but this close he can _feel_ the other man trembling, his veins pounding with adrenaline and rage and fear and the scent of all of it sticks in Hank's nostrils, his heartbeat slamming in time with the pulse he can see throbbing in Alex's jugular, and it takes everything he's capable of to back away, stumbling back as Alex sweeps past, smashing his hand into Hank's well-ordered collection of test tubes as he goes.

With a sound far more animal than human, Hank hurls Alex's pristine new medical file after him, the carefully-written pages fluttering uselessly against the door.

 

\--

 

They cleaned Raven's room out together: Charles sorting through boxes and boxes of mementos and memories; Hank folding dresses and coats and scarves into careful piles to be put into storage or sent out to the children's home in town for any particularly vivacious teenagers.

Neither of them pretended their tears were anything but, and it was some indiscriminate time deep in the small hours when Charles finally closed and locked his sister's door, with a finality that _ached_ but was somehow far purer and sharper than any emotion either of them had managed to summon up for her in the ten years since she vanished into a faint puff of red smoke on a blood-soaked beach in Cuba.

Emptying Alex's room took a far shorter time. A few t-shirts, the pair of shoes he came out of prison in; cracked sunglasses gathering dust on the window-ledge and a textbook on biophysics that Hank stared at for long, formless hours, running his fingers across the cover and remembering Alex watching him over the desk as he tried to explain protein structures, daring him to object to Alex's knee pressed between both of his under the tabletop.

 

\--

 

They only have two other students at the moment. Ororo Munro, a brilliant, bright, furiously intense girl who can control weather systems, and Jason Stryker, a traumatised illusionist who mostly confines himself to corners and high doses of Clozapine between exhausting sessions with Charles, trying desperately to box up his powers into something measurable. Even if he didn't hole himself up in his lab, it would be astonishingly easy for Hank to go days and days without speaking to anyone. But sometimes, even in a mansion with three storeys and five hundred acres and an honest-to-god _billiard_ room, Hank finds the beast in him howling for some fresh air.

Charles doesn't so much as blink when Hank appears beside him, leaning muscular blue forearms on the edge of the veranda. He looks worn though: rough-edged with his sleeves pushed up and his tie knotted mostly as an afterthought-- warning signs that still make Hank twitch to look at him.

"...How's he doing?" He asks into the silence, turning his palm over to watch the droplets of rain dotting quietly against his skin. Charles' head tilts:

"Alex?"

"Jason." Hank corrects, forcing down the miserable twist in his stomach at the sound of the other man's name.

"Oh." Charles' eyebrows contract; he exhales hugely, pushing his fingers through his hair. "It's...it's devastating, really. He has so much power and so little control over it."

Hank glances back out at the lawn rolling away from them, pale apple green after a hot summer, the rain now a welcome relief.

"Well that's why he's here. Right?"

"Hm, yes...My worry with Jason--" Charles nudges the wheels of his chair, rolling himself back a little so he can reach into his pocket "--Is that reality, for him, is such a transient concept, he has no use for it. Or us." He fits a cigarette between his lips, holding his lighter to the end until it glows red, sheltered with his hand from the rain. "I feel I need to know better the world he's running from...But he won't let me get that far...I won't offer you one."

Hank waves a hand at the cigarette held out enticingly between them: "Can't." he apologises "Asthma."

They look at each other for a moment, before Charles snorts a laugh and they enjoy a few minutes of embarrassing giggles, watching the clouds start gathering a few miles out, a storm threatening over North Salem.

"...Do you think that's Ororo?" Hank nods towards the menacing cumulonimbus, but Charles shakes his head:

"It's not." He exhales another musing stream of smoke into the sky. "Y'know Hank, when I was younger-- I mean, a child-- I used to spend whole afternoons hiding, just to see if anyone cared enough to come and find me."

Hank glances at him through the periphery of his glasses, but Charles' eyes remain steadily on the sky.

"...Did they?"

"Not often."

Hank bites the inside of his lip, following the line of his gaze, watching the old, rusting satellite resolutely unmoved in the distance.

"...I liked it better when you used to just yell drunkenly at me." He sighs eventually and Charles grins, a valiant replica of the old glinting, wicked smile that fooled them all:

"So did I, Hank."

 

\--

 

"You have to stop doing this." Hank murmurs, pressing the keypad to close the door behind them. From his spot propped against the foot of one of Hank's sample fridges, Alex glances up, face bathed in eerie torchlight. He doesn't look surprised. He doesn't look anything, actually. But then, he shouldn't, since it is after all _Hank's lab_ he's broken into _again._

"I guess Charles gave you the key code this time." Hanks sighs, picking his way over to come to a stop awkwardly in front of Alex's shadowed form, leaning back against the steel-topped table.

Alex makes no response, except to hook an arm over his knee and hold Hank's gaze with that fractious stare that makes the hackles rise at the back of Hank's neck even when he doesn't _have_ hackles.

He doesn't have the energy. He really doesn't. He's _tired_ of forcing people to stay alive; of making the people he loves comfortable in their own skins when every minute he's horrified about being trapped in his own.

The silence drips between them, thick and choking. Hank is the first to look away.

"The mansion's half-empty." He gestures vaguely at the mute building around them. "You can sleep wherever you want."

"Yeah, I got that." Alex snaps back, voice rough with what Hank decides he'll call tiredness. "So I'm sleeping _here._ "

"I _work_ here."

"There's breakfast cereal in your filing cabinet."

Hank buries his face in his palms, turning away at the familiar wrench in his gut. It's been forty hours since his last injection, and he'd protest innocence, but the idea of facing the man who wore the name 'Havoc' with a wry grimace and a flash of black pupils seemed impossible without a little 'Beast' on his side.

"Look," Alex growls. "I didn't come back here just to piss you off--"

"-- Then why--?"

"-- And you're fucking _hiding_ from me! How am I supposed to say any--"

"--Your unit reported you killed in action, did you know that?" Hank snaps, grasping backwards with a hand that isn't entirely his anymore and curling nail crescents into metal.

A dangerous shadow contracts between Alex's eyebrows: "What--?"

"--Yeah..." Hank can feel the anger pressing against his chest and he doesn't want to say any of this but he can't help it pouring out of him. "...What, you think I didn't- that I didn't wanna keep up with- with this--" Hank rakes the hair away from his eyes. "...I tracked what your unit was doing, where they posted you, it's...The-the US Army's security procedures are deplorable, honestly, anyone with... And they..." He opens his mouth, sucks a breath in, watching Alex's incredulous face smearing around the edges: "...Ten months ago your serial number vanished.” He finishes quietly. “They put you on the list of the dead."

Alex has gotten back to his feet now, tight fists knotted at his sides; but Hank got past being afraid of Alex Summers' temper a long time ago. Red flushes his cheekbones, but the rest of his achingly unchanged face is washed white.

"...Could Charles not...?" He questions at last, and Hank forces back a cracked chuckle; pinches the bridge of his nose instead:

"... Not for a long time."

Alex stares at him.

Hank has watched him lose it so many times-- the petroleum-fire that builds under his skin until it bursts out from under his fingernails and devastates everything around him; everything inside of him. But there is none of that now, and maybe that's more unsettling. The _control._ A muscle twitches in his jaw but nothing screams, nothing _burns._

Hank shrugs: “...None of the others ever came back.”

He glances at the floor, blinking at his loafers and Alex's battered army boots standing so close, so he doesn't quite know who moves first. But somehow _,_ all at once, the warmth of Alex's body is pressed against his and he's pushing their mouths together, clumsy and stubborn and out of practice.

Fear clenches in Hank's stomach and he almost pushes Alex away before his hands curl in the bottom of his t-shirt instead, tugging him close, squeezing his eyes shut at the _impossible_ feeling of Alex's lips against his again: an old intimacy he'd never expected to have in the first place and had given up hoping he might ever get back. It's more ragged breaths than anything; hot lips and skin sheened with panic and ten years of misery trembling between them and Alex's fingers wound tight in the sides of Hank's hair like his nearness is the only thing keeping him alive.

They only break apart when they finally need oxygen again, Alex burying his forehead into the curve of Hank's shoulder, hard silence thrumming against Hank's eardrums in time with Alex's heartbeat. Hank swallows hard, uncurling one hand from Alex's shirt to nudge his glasses back up his nose, but the other man speaks before Hank can force any words out:

"So... I can sleep here tonight then?"

And Hank can't do anything other than choke back a weak laugh, exhaling relief and _shut up_ against the other man's hair and wrapping his arms around him tight enough to make sure he's really there, really _really_ there and _not dead_ and just _Alex._

Somehow, Charles knows to cancel all Hank's classes the next day. And they're all too accustomed to disaster to call it anything more than what it is: some connection born out of desperation and disaster. But it has the air of an aftermath; two pieces fixed up with tape and super-glue and tacitly irreparable, but stronger together than apart, anyway. At least for now.

 


End file.
